Bottled milk

I’m a bit late to this but – why on earth all the ruckus about ‘free’ milk?

Firstly, it’s not free. Secondly, ministers have been asked to suggest ways to reduce costs and get better value out of taxpayers’ money. And thirdly, ‘because David Cameron isn’t keen on the idea’ is not a good enough reason not to do something.

The process by which we should be deciding what to spend money on goes like this:

1)      Is this an absolute life or death necessity? Is it something the government MUST provide, is it something that’s a nice thing to have, will someone else provide it better or cheaper?

2)      What are the benefits? Do sufficient people benefit?

3)      Can we achieve the same thing cheaper? OR can we achieve the same thing in a different way?

I’ve discussed before (YEARS ago) why we need to re-examine what the state decides to do with taxpayers’ money. But more than that, given the dire circumstances we are in, I think this government has an obligation to do this from the bottom up – so, not “What can we cut?” but rather “What must we maintain?”

Delightfully, the government seemed to want to try that when it launched the consultations on public spending. But rather disappointingly, every suggestion seems to have been met with either ‘we’re already planning that’ or ‘we aren’t interested in doing that’ so I do wonder what the point was.

As with this furore over school milk, if this government is going to live up to its rhetoric on devolving power, it needs to make some decisions about how it handles media coverage.

Either it cannot stand a word of criticism, in which case they might as well ditch localism, the Big Society, reducing the tax burden and empowering citizens. Or it’s willing and able to take a bit of a battering because it believes in those things. But it can’t have it both ways, and currently it is being damaged by being willing to float radical ideas but then unwilling to discuss them when a newspaper gets in a fankle about them.

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